UA Combine Authentic

1-BACKGROUND

As a brand with a strong grasp of who they are and what they stand for, our challenge was to simplify and focus Under Armour’s sophomore release of the combine authentic line, and to create an identity system and flagship eCommerce experience. One that helps them express themselves in the right way, to the right people.

WEB PRESENCE:

2 - Challenge

With an ever expanding roster of competitors in marketplace, a focus on a more direct to consumer interaction was necessary in order to broaden UA’s reach to new demographics. As a brand historically associated with action sports, our goal was to create a revamped delivery system and interactive experience aimed to inspire the brands broadening training audience.

PRINT:

3 - Solutions

We worked closely with UA’s internal brand and eCommerce teams to develop a training platform that focused on leveraging their roster of trainers with healthy social media followings. The updated platform portrays the brands progressive, irreverent, and passionate training culture while connecting with their core community of people that train.

PRINT:

4 - Results

The result was a bold, global eCommerce platform grounded in a framework that’s flexible across both Men's, Women's, and Youth targets. The updated platform speaks to a broader audience while providing enhanced merchandising opportunities, stronger product presentation, contextual content pathways, elevated photography standards, and a more engaging brand experience.

Baltimore Human

1 - Background

Baltimore truly is one of America’s greatest cities. Rich in both history and innovation. It is an amazing city of neighborhoods and a vibrant place to live, work, and play. It is a hub of innovation, an intersection of commerce, a collection of proud, distinct neighborhoods driven by the force of its most important distinction: its people. In 2015, the city of Baltimore experienced riots that thrust it into the spot light not based on its television persona, but one of real life where a community expressed their frustration with the system.

2 - Challenge

Our crisis management team was on hand with the Mayor to assist with messaging and response. We needed develop a PR strategy to manage the blowback of the riots both internally and externally within the city’s borders and across the world. Our goal was to translate a better understanding of the city’s pain to itself and the world with a message that could clearly ring true to anyone that heard it.

3 - Solution

Develop a PR strategy that speaks to the diverse family of neighborhoods that create Baltimore’s most unique personality that expressed the communities pain in the most genuine manner possible. The translation of message that could be related to across the world. A message that speaks to a sentiment that has been expressed across every cultural line that has ever existed… the Human one.

Results

Through in-person focus groups, interviews, research, and strategic PR campaigns, our messaging focused on the development of a key value proposition: “Baltimore is human.” This message resonated strongly with both residents and those on the outside looking in, and highlighted what is truly unique about Baltimore — that what makes it vibrant and unique are its vibrant and unique people.

UA Golf Shoe 1

1 - Background

It wasn't Jordan Spieth's swing that commanded the attention of Under Armour. It was the young golfer's competitiveness. Speith, now a leader in the world of golf was an avid UA fan since age 11 and was signed with them when he was 19. It was the competitive drive of both UA and Speith that made such a genuine partnership, So of course the natural progression would lead to the development of shoe for the number one golfer in world.

2 - Challenge

With UA’s focus so squarely on the development of the shoe, our team was engaged to develop its first introduction to the world. What made this engagement unique was the timing. The day our team was shooting photography on Speith at a Dallas studio, we asked to create and deliver a commercial spot that would run across the brands social media channels, set to run just hours away. Challenge accepted.

3 - Solution

With just over a 16hr time window to deliver a completed spot, we split our photo crew into two parts. One to finish the photography and the other to script, film, capture audio, and post the spot. Utilizing an unused maintenance closet, we created a makeshift audio recording studio, and with headphones, we began composing a music track, writing up lyrics where we recorded, mixed and mastered a soundtrack complete with the vocals of one of our production assistants that just happened to have an amazing voice.

Results

13hrs after we accepted the challenge, we successfully delivered the spot with not one additional edit requested by UA or Speith. A little over three hours later, the “UA_These Shoes were Made for Golfing” went on to air and go live.

T100 | Leaders & Legends

1 - Background

The Top 100 MBE awards were created to recognize those enterprising minority entrepreneurs that fuel the mideast region’s economy through their innovation, sacrifices and dedication. These incredible men and women achieved the American dream of business ownership despite the obstacles in their path. Their stories are real and their contributions are inspiring.

2 - Challenge

Having gained national recognition and beginning to be replicated throughout the U.S., this award organization was originally the monicker’d as the Minority Business Enterprise Awards. They felt this expansion required a fresh new look and feel. Our team was commissioned to rebrand the organization, create a marketing strategy, design and develop an updated web presence, and produce the inaugural live event introducing its new look.

3 - Solution

With less than 60 days to design, execute, and deliver - our team created a multi-silo’d task list of executables. Where many of these things happen serially, time demanded that these deliverables happen in parallel. Creation of a new name, new brand mark & logo, along with an updated web presence, each introduced with a film like trailer were all in development simultaneously.

Results

The award and its organization were re-introduced to a pleasantly surprised live audience with its rebranded “Top 100 Leaders & Legends Award” titling & logo with a brand mark the “T100”.

The Festival

1 - background

The city of Baltimore’s African American Festival, AFRAM, began as a showcase for the local African-American community more than 40 years ago. Its history, which celebrates African-American food, music, arts and crafts, included performances by local and national artists. It’s been produced by primarily small local promoters, but at its peak, it was helmed by the NAACP and remained the largest music festival in Baltimore. It’s a city icon.

2 - Challenge

In late March 2011, AFRAM was a broken festival that had a 2010 attendance of around 4,000. With no healthy sponsorships, more than $450k in debt, and its producers and the city were being sued by multiple vendors, the three day event was destined to end. The newly appointed Mayor who didn’t want the festival to fail on her watch, asked our team to repair the festival and produce a successful event… by June. Challenged with a reputation for not paying its debts, no serious sponsorships, no label or agency that would provide artists, and with less than three months to successfully execute… we accepted.

3 - Solution

With a 3 year contractual commitment, our team began from scratch… first by discarding everything from previous executions of the event, completely rebranding the event, expanding to a multicultural audience, pulling in national companies as key sponsors, brokering national partnerships and an incredibly healthy dose of MARKETING, MARKETING, MARKETING, AND MARKETING.

Results

We promised the Mayor that year one we’d deliver 50,000 attendee’s over a two day period and by year three, 100,000. With every national/anchor sponsor coming from our client list, the official fire department attendance number for 2011 was 560,000 attendees across the 22acre event ground the first year. The Mayor signed us for an additional three years and by the final year of 2016 the rebranded event, The African American Music Festival (tagged as “The Festival”) touted $26million in economic impact and a social media footprint of more that 26million unique impressions.

UA/PGA Ryder Cup

1 - Background

The Under Armour/PGA partnership around the 2017 Ryder Cup needed an impactful social media presence. So their internal teams went to work in 2016 and for the next 12months they produced multiple spots with a myriad of “USA” based themes. The powers that make the final call didn’t like anything their internal teams submitted and time had run out… The Ryder Cup was days away.

2 - Challenge

About 7 days before the Ryder Cup, the Under Armour team engaged our team to create and produce a series of spots with a “USA” based theme. The effort involved location captures of UA athletes in Boston, Los Angeles, and Baltimore.

3 - Solutions

We dispatched three of our producers with gorilla film crews simultaneously to Boston, Los Angeles and Baltimore to capture UA’s talent on film, while our writers began scripting and crafting messaging back in Baltimore. Through FaceTime and from ABC studios in Los Angeles, our director helmed each capture. The footage captures would be uploaded to the cloud, where the Baltimore post team would edit based on rough boards and creation, mix and master of the audio compositions.

Results

The 5 spot series was delivered 2days before the Ryder Cup. Enthused with the delivery, the PGA made the decision to not only run the spots along social media channels, but across their broadcast channel as well.

UA/Sagamore

1 - Background

Under Armour’s financial arm, Sagamore Investments is helming one of the largest real estate development projects in the country. The footprint crest the waterfront of Baltimore’s southern harbor area. This underdeveloped waterfront neighborhood, Port Covington, has officially become a sprawling new development with 3 million square feet of space surrounding Under Armour’s global headquarters with planned apartments, offices, and retail space for the 260-acre peninsula.

2 - Challenge

With a myriad of community organizations and key local and state politicians pushing back against the project, success of the Port Covington Development required buy in from not only these organizations and politicians, but from the community of Baltimoreans altogether.

3 - Solution

Create a grass roots awareness campaign through a series of events, town hall/community engagements, and collateral introduced through a filmic type of PSA. Initially, it was crucial that the targets of this effort are the true grass root community leaders across the city’s broad spectrum of cultures.

Results

The campaign was incredibly well received and went on to garner much more support than anticipated or needed and on to securing the full $600million of TIF support with full buy-in from the state and city.

UA/Player, Program, Coach

1 - Background

As a brand with a strong grasp of not only who they are and what they stand for, but an understanding of who the market targets are, Under Armour’s “I Will” campaign was a few years old. Their internal creative teams were toying with several updates to methods of reaching their ever evolving market targets. UA’s athletic endorsements were carrying a moderate return with a myriad of associated headaches with many of those athletes not giving full buy-in on the brand.

2 - Challenge

UA engaged our team to develop a flagship alternative method for engaging market targets that could solve for the traditional athlete endorsement conundrum that they manage pretty much daily.

3 - Solution

The solution was immediately apparent to our team… develop a concept that essentially would become a model based on Under Armour’s affect, engagement, and ultimately endorsement with Jordan Speith, who at 11 years old had become a hardcore fan of UA and their gear. Video documenting the journeys of young athletes through genuine engagement with the brand would make a great docu-series without the boredom of a documentary or the nonsense of reality television..

Result

Our team developed a doc-series concept, “Player Program Coach” that would follow young athlete’s journey from high school, college, and the NFL. The series would pose the question, “What makes wining team?”… is it the “Player”, the “Program”, or the “Coach”. Key to maintaining the genuine feel that this wasn’t simply a promotional effort for the brand, UA branding remained subtle throughout the series.

UA_Spiderman

1 - Background

The successful conclusion of a very delicate negotiations in the creation of the partnership with opposing comic powerhouses Marvel and DC Comics, brought some unique challenges to Under Armour when initially bringing their hero branded gear to market. With UA’s internal team focused on a myriad of marketing launch executions around the country, the initial social media presence had be left off of the table.

2 - Challenge

Our team was producing UA’s presence at the Phoenix Open when we were engaged to assist them with their inaugural launch of their “Hero” campaign. We had a couple of hurdles. UA wanted to use Hunter Mahan and Anthony Anderson in the spots. Both had very narrow windows of availability on the same day. With no studio available to shoot and Mahan’s narrow window was occurring during a signing at a local sporting goods store, and again, time was not on our side. The spots needed to hit social media the next the next morning.

3 - Solutions

Within a matter of a hours our writing staff delivered the concept, our site design team for the Phoenix Open built a locker room in the stockroom of the sporting good store, our logistics team flew Anderson in from Los Angeles, and our production team flipped the switch from capturing photography at the “Open” to motion and audio capture of Mahan and Anderson where “action” was called at 1:30pm that same day.

Result

From his hotel room on the grounds of the Phoenix Open, our director composed and created an original music score, edited, mixed and mastered the final cut before night’s end. The spot hit the social media channels the next day and were well received. The spots went on to receive international Telly Awards.